back

Najrin
Islam

An independent writer and performer, Najrin Islam is a postgraduate from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India. She has been associated with several platforms as a writer, including Alternative South Asia Photography, Critical Collective, Write | Art |Connect, and Five Million Incidents, curated by Raqs Media Collective. She was awarded the first Art Writers’ Award 2018-19 by TAKE on art magazine and Swiss-Arts Council Pro Helvetia, which resulted in a residency and an associated publication titled Archive as Medium: Exploring the Performative Body. She has worked as Associate Editor for Art Dose magazine, Cinema edition (October 2019), which focused on marginal histories of Indian cinema and questions of visibility across changing bodies of reception. She has also contributed a chapter titled “Body, Loom and Labour: Exploring Cotton through the Skein of Web and Weave” to the publication, Writing the Body with the Body that covers
the works of artist Stefanie Knobel, published by Edition Fink, Switzerland (2020).

Najrin’s research interest is situated at the intersection of moving image histories, archival politics and institutional omissions. In her writings, she has focused on the performative potential of the image as it manifests through the slippage between fact and fiction. She gravitates towards work
that interrogates illegible histories, archival possibilities and spectral vocabularies. She continues to write about the image in how it has emerged as fertile ground to not only re-imagine its analogue histories, but also navigate its position in the current digital infrastructures of surveillance and informal economies of public dispersion.